TOMMASO FISCALETTI (1981) is a photographic artist based in Cape Town. His work explores the connection between humans, memory, and the universe, moving between reality and imagination.
In 2016, his project Between Home and Wisdom was presented in a wide exhibition at the Santa Maria Della Scala Museum in Siena, accompanied by a monograph. The same year, he began working with Nic Grobler on Hemelliggaam or The Attempt To Be Here Now (Hemelliggaam, in Afrikaans: heavenly body), a visual archive of photographs, videos, and installations that brings together images of astronomical observatories, remote landscapes, and inspirations from old local (Afrikaans) science fiction novels. In 2021, he began collaborating with anthropologist Nicola Perugini on The Skin Underneath. Through photography and public installations, the project examines how citizens perceive the Villa Marina Colony, a Fascist-era building on the Pesaro waterfront (the author's hometown), connecting to individual and collective stories.
His works are part of public and private collections and have been showcased internationally. Fiscaletti has taught photography at IED Milan and currently teaches at the Creative Academy in Cape Town.
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Biography
More than a decade in the making, Hemelliggaam — Afrikaans for '𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺' — is an archive of original photographs, video works, and installations exploring the profound links between humanity, astronomy, and the South African landscape.
The archive moves across astronomical sites such as the Square Kilometre Array in Carnarvon and the Tswaing Crater in Pretoria, through the numinous landscapes of the greater Karoo, and into portraits of the people and communities who inhabit these spaces. Fiscaletti and Grobler weave a story punctuated by passages of text, found glass plate negatives, and fragments drawn from Afrikaans science fiction — together forming an assemblage of distinctive elements connected through the vast silence of the sky.
Evident in the artists’ sensitivity throughout is an inquiry into the most essential qualities of humanity: curiosity and resilience in the midst of the unknown, and a capacity for imagination when encountering what we cannot yet understand.
